Some visual screen design technologies have been developed that provide mechanisms for users to generate new graphical user interface designs, for instance, for mobile applications. Users creating visual designs for screen-based output (e.g., web sites, web applications and mobile applications) often need to design areas within a screen display that contain repeated fields (e.g., including content and/or formatting) arranged in a list or grid format. For example, a contact list view in a mobile application might include a list, where each row in the list contains an avatar photo, text fields for name and job title, and a chevron icon for navigation to a detail screen.
In order to design these types of repeated fields, users must replicate an object or set of objects within a field, including format and/or content, multiple times. Typically, users perform such a replication by drawing one example of an object and, thereafter, copying and pasting the object as desired. After multiple objects have been pasted, the object copies are repositioned so as to match the list layout. Not only is the initial structuring of the visual design tedious using this replication process, but experimenting with different layouts and editing the object content and/or format can also be difficult and time consuming. For instance, experimenting with different amounts of spacing between objects, different styles for the text objects, different shapes for an avatar photo, or different spacing between rows and/or columns can be tedious because any change to one aspect must be manually made to all the other aspects.